


Sketching Life

by Jonaira



Series: Sketching Life (or the How's and Why's of everything Steve Rogers) [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Art, Artist Steve Rogers, Awesome Bucky Barnes, Bromance, Bullying, Coming of Age, Drama, Drawing, Epic Bromance, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Mild Humour, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Pre-Canon, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sad, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, good parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 10:09:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3932806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jonaira/pseuds/Jonaira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ambedo</p><p>n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.</p><p> </p><p>Because sometimes the little guys have big things to show and tell.Or,the how's and why's of Steve becoming an artist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sketching Life

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [23emotions](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/23emotions) collection. 



> Un-betaed. All mistakes are my own.

Steve watches the raindrops roll down his window. The bruise on his jaw throbs a bit, so he rests it on the cool glass and hopes the maroon splotch will look better by the time his mother gets back from the hospital. She’ll tilt his head and examine the boo-boo and then tweak his nose and ask him the how and why, all the while fingers carding through his hair, and the other hand holding an ice-pack to it. He should check to see if there are ice cubes remaining.

She’s tired when she comes back and smells like the antiseptic and acetone of the hospital. She kisses his forehead, careful not to let her uniform touch him when he puts out the plate of sausages he’s fried for her. Germs, she reasons. She trusts him more than the parent of any other 8 year old they both know of. And he’s never burnt dinner either.

When she sees the now mottled purple patch (so much for the ice) she frowns and does indeed ask him the how and why and the who. She kisses it better instead of playing with his hair though.

“I don’t know his name, he’s one of the older boys though. Big stick-ball champ.”

“Okay Stevie, we’ll play a game then. Like the police. You describe him and I’ll draw him. And then we'll put him in lock-up. Does that sound good ?”

Steve giggles. Ma brings out an old used envelope and stick of graphite.

“Now sir, tell me. Did he look like a pumpkin or a pipe ? ”

“Pumpkin , with the Halloween smile too.”

“Hair color ?”

“Puddle-brown”

Ma adds a fat grey rain cloud over the pumpkin head and a few drops for good measure.

They go on for a while. At last Steve adds, “And he smelt really bad too”. So Ma draws a couple of flies circling.

Steve picks up the ridiculous drawing but his smile fades. “ I don’t want to run into him again. He likes to pick on the younger boys and it really wasn’t Johnny’s fault that his socks were mismatched. They were his last two and he’d rolled them down as far as possible. But the bully saw them anyway and tried to steal his shoes. When I tried to snatch them back he hit me. ”

Ma carefully puts down the pencil, and pulls Steve into her lap. He’s frail enough that he feels like a six year old instead of his eight years. “You were born early you know. Two weeks and 3 days to be precise. And a tiny tiny tiny thing you were. Supplies were still low after the war, and I still didn’t know if your daddy was coming home or not. I didn’t know if you would for that matter either. “ Steve tucked his head under her chin. “But you, my baby, were a fighter even then. And you must promise me you always will be. I don’t mean for you to go looking for a fight, oh no. But never back down when it is for a cause you believe in. Remember Stevie, if _you_ don’t stand up for what you believe is right, you can’t expect others too. A good leader always leads by example, and one day little sir, you’ll be the biggest man of them all.”

Steve stays quiet, mulling over her words. “But what if they’re too strong Ma, what do I do then ?”

“Then, you try your best. The strongest one is not the one with the bigger muscles or the longer bones or he quicker fists but the one who puts all that they do have to the best use. And you, have the most brains. You’ve got to learn how to outsmart these bullies. But more importantly, and this is what your Daddy would say if he were here, you’ve got to know when to retreat, when to pull back so you can fight another day.”

That night Steve sleeps with the cartoon of the bully under his pillow. The next time the P.E coach snaps at him, calling him Runt Rogers, he caricatures him under his desk. When he comes home, he puts the drawing (all crooked lines and hesitant strokes) on the ground and jumps on it for all his worth.

Every time somebody’s mean to him or picks on him for being small and slow, he draws them and tells their graphite version in the privacy of his room exactly what he thinks’ about them. He gets picked on a lot, so he gets better and better very quickly. His lines are cleaner, quicker and more sturdy. The pencil feels like a mere extension of his hand.

One day during lunch hour, James Barnes catches sight of him sketching furiously under his desk and looks over his shoulder. When Steve flips the paper over, heart in his mouth that Barnes will report him (he can already feel the cane on his backside) Barnes sticks out his hand, flashing a wide if slightly buck-toothed grin at him. “You should put that up on the post in the yard. It looks exactly like Snipes.” Snipes was a couple of years ahead of them and notorious for stealing lunches from the younger children. Steve was sketching during lunch since he had lost his own to the Snipes after helping up and offering a sandwich to Willy Chase who’d put up a fight when his beef sandwich had been demanded, and who’d ended up in the dirt with a scraped knee.

“What if Snipes comes to know its me ?” Steve asks, his mothers’ words about not looking for trouble coming back to him.

Barnes snorts. “That’s something to worry about only if he had two brain cells to rub against each other. Last I checked, there’s nothing between his ears. C’mon Rogers , I’ll cover ya.”

By the next day, Snipes is the laughing stock of the boys. Steve had added fangs and a fair amount of slobber as well. Nobody looses their lunch that day and Barnes grins at Steve, missing a tooth today. “You're pretty swell, Rogers. You can call me Bucky.”

Bucky tacks up the more risqué sketches of their schoolyard enemies and the unknown artist’s fame spreads. Steve is a bundle of nerves on those days, torn between excitement and anticipation for the student’s reaction to the latest to-be object of ridicule, and squeaky persistent voice in his ear the one that goes on “What if they find out ?”

Bucky will hear none of it the once Steve asks this out loud. “Nobody knocks your teeth out without me loosing a few o’ mine first pal.”

Steve isn’t quite sure about that since Bucky now isn’t so much buck-toothed as gap toothed, but he trusts him nonetheless. And Bucky does make good on his promise one afternoon when a burly upperclassman mad as a bee in a bonnet, having just been laughed at courtesy of a particularly accurate sketch of him wearing a dunce cap and snatching the stationary from a few cowering younger boys decides to take it out on Steve. Its clear he has no idea that the cause of his consternation is indeed Steve’s handiwork, but that doesn’t stop the possibility of Steve’s lunch making a reappearance anyway. Steve swallows and keeps it down successfully, fists coming up to protect his face, but Bucky steps in before him and tosses a classically Bucky line,

“Pick on somebody your own size would ya. Course, that might be difficult seeing that the nearest pigsty is quite a trip away.” Bucky neatly sidesteps the huffing mountain of a boy and trips him up at the same time. “I’ll meet you in class. Scoot !” he mutters to Steve out of the corner of his mouth. Steve isn’t happy about being told to run away from a fight and leave Bucky to face the music. Bucky gives him a shove towards the school building but if only things were that simple. A while later Steve has a freshly cut chin from when the stone hit him when the bully knocked him over and Bucky could’ve looked better but he still huffs a laugh and titles him “The little guy from Brooklyn too dumb to run away from a fight.”

Within a few months the lunch hour is a much less nasty time, although nobody knows the identity of the artist and his dreaded pencil yet. Infact, with the less bullying, it was more often that Steve would get to see the boys being nicer to each other, especially to the smaller or frailer ones, the bean poles and the tubby children, all simply because fewer and fewer of the boys were worried about getting picked on for playing with them, or offering to share their lunch. And its then that he thinks of drawing out these little acts of kindness, instead of just the more unpleasant bits of school life. Steve decides that he may have started off drawing negativity, but he needs to focus on the goodness too, the glass half full.

It takes some time to learn how to draw a smile instead of a frown; its not just simply flipping the downward crescent of the mouth up; its in the crinkling of the eyes, the quirking of the eyebrows , the relaxing of the jaw.

It takes some time to learn how to capture kindness in the tilt of the neck, in the reach of the fingers.

He learns quickly though, eyes studying the easy smile and good-natured laugh that Bucky embodies . Bucky still is the one in their two-man team to sneak around and climb up to the not-so-easy to reach but well visible spots and Bucky still crosses his arms and raises his chin defiantly at any would-be assaulters of Steve. Steve learns to capture this feistiness and open challenge too. He binds them together gives them to Bucky for his 9th birthday and Bucky claps him on the back and flashes him the patent if now not so buck-toothed smile.

It doesn’t take time though for most of the boys to hope for a Good Guy caricature of themselves to appear quietly one morning, taped to their class door maybe, or on the yard post, or fluttering from under the old basket-ball hoop.

He starts drawing Ma as well. Sometimes its just her eyes and the lines in her forehead, sometimes its just a silhouette of the two of them curled up on the creaky old rocking chair on Saturday nights, when she her shift hours aren’t so bad. He sketches her everyday though, once simply drawing his hand in hers, fingers intertwined, her wedding band a white swatch on the sheet.

When his grandma dies soon after his tenth birthday, he starts to think about permanence and time. He learns to draw and shade the shadows and hollows , the ridges and highlights of her face in the open coffin from memory. Photos are neigh impossible for them to get and he does his best to have a drawing of the old lady as close to her smiling face in life ready for his mother’s birthday. Ma wipes the silent tears from her cheeks and holds him close, whispering “Thankyou” and “I love you” after the Months Mind mass for the old lady.

For a while, he obsesses about loss; he sketches every flower and bloom he can, every Swallow and open pond, worried that they’ll never look the same as they do now, vibrant and alive, just before Autumn crisps the air and turns the leaves every shades of flame and the Swallows fly south for the winter.

He draws warmth in the winter; fires and mittens, Christmas trees and carolers bonfires and roasted chestnuts and mangers and with slumbering lamb. He draws exhilaration and adrenaline, Bucky on a sleigh, arms thrown up, punching the air in the rush of wind down the slope.

He draws hopelessness and shock, the first time he sees a mugging gone wrong as he passes an alleyway. Although twelve now, he’s small enough to not be seen crouching behind a bin, unable to cry for help or run in to help out the poor man himself. Its over before he knows it and the murderer is into the wind. He draws hopelessness and cruelty when the police come and ask him to describe the attacker. He does even better and himself draws hopelessness and desperation, brutality and chaos, in the lines of the attacker’s face as he sketches out the man. Try as he might he can’t hold back the wildness in the man’s eyes, even though he knows the busy and weary cops have no time for such sentiments.

“People aren’t bad, situations are.” His mother tells him when he explains to her the feeling he just can’t shake, that the assaulter didn’t mean for the death or even the to hurt the now dead man (God rest his soul). “But its like you said Ma, we need to try our best.” He tells her with a sigh. “And this wasn’t his. It was the easy way out, to snatch somebody’s wallet in a back-alley.”

Ma stays quiet for a moment before saying softly, “Stevie, it doesn’t apply to this situation for sure, but sometimes picking the most difficult path isn’t always the best, you need to yield and take the easy way out as well if that's the need of the hour. And sometimes, the right thing to do and the best thing to do aren’t the same thing at all.”

He learns to draw confusion, the two sides of a war, both convinced they’re right. He learns to draw dependability, he learns to draw constancy, his mother’s smile at the end of a long day for him, Bucky’s hand on his shoulder steadying him when he trips over uncoordinated feet. Steve thinks he'll be okay as long as he can catch his emotions in the lines though.

He stops drawing, _can’t_ draw when his mother dies, tuberculosis snatching her away. He's twenty. He binds the sketches of her together and tries to lock them away but can’t and so he sits in the rocking chair that still creaks as if it bore the weight of the two of them and tries to remember every silver hair and every fleck of brown in her blue eyes, hugging them to his heart.

He has no lines or colors, no graphite or charcoal and the white glare of the paper makes his head throb until he can’t tell if the tears washing his cheeks are those of grief or pain.

It had always been just the two of them, she worked hard and so did he, selling his sketches for a few pence, never accepting charity of any kind. Ma had taught him strength and will and independence since his earliest of years.

Bucky though, teaches him that there is strength in accepting help too, and courage in knowing when to let go and share the burden.

“I’m with ya till the end of the line, pal.”

Steve picks up the pencil again. It holds steady.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hang out on Tumblr yo :) www.jonairadreaming.tumblr.com


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